Archive for the ‘Policy’ Category
Wikipedia Vandalism Study - US Senators
Several months ago, a number of Wikipedia Review members joined me in a project to methodically enumerate one calendar quarter’s worth (4Q 2007) of edit data underlying the 100 Wikipedia articles about the (then) current United States Senators.
What we found was alarming at times. While most vandalized edits were brief in duration and clearly juvenile in content, a substantial portion of edits were plainly intended to be hurtful and defamatory against the Senators — and they lasted for not just minutes, but hours, days, even weeks at a time.
Using the Wikipedia page traffic tool, we attempted to interpolate the number of “page views” that each Senator’s article likely witnessed during the damaged edit. The damaged edit that saw the greatest number of page views before correction regarded Senator John McCain: “McCain was born in Florida in the then American-controlled Panama Canal Zone“, which lasted for over 3 days, under about 93,000 views where nobody noticed or bothered to correct this obvious error.
The English Language (Wikipedian Variant)
The internet has always been a favorite place for those who enjoy the odd bit of irrational hyperbole now and again, along with the occasional complete breakdown of logic, and of course the ever-popular just-plain-wierd utterance. (Disclamer: The Wikipedia Review isn’t immune to this, though there’s nowhere near as much of it here as we’ve been accused of having - at least in some quarters.)
Hardcore users and administrators on the English Wikipedia have a variant of the English language all their own, full of acronyms and jargon, as well as some rather creative redefinitions of popular terminology. Read the rest of this entry »